Photography: David bailey

1. Famous quote: “I don't care about
composition or anything like that. I just
want the emotion of the person in the
picture to come across.... to get something
from that person”
David Bailey, born in January 1938,
is a well known and recognised
British photographer. Now aged
72 and still photographing to date,
Bailey has been widely known for
his portraiture throughout the
peaks of his career.
Personal background:
Bailey has married four times, currently in
a marriage with Catherine Dyer since
1986.
He has a profound passion of the works
of Picasso.

2.  Although born in Leytonstone (London), Bailey and his family were forced
to move to East Ham after a World War II bomb destroyed their home
when he was just three years old.
 He had a keen liking for bird-watching and natural history
 Bailey attended a private school but, due to problems with dyslexia, he
only attended a small amount of times. He was known to only excel in his
art lessons.
 When David Bailey was 15, he left school to become a copy boy before
joining the Royal Air Force, training in Singapore in 1957. He purchased his
first decent camera in 1956, a Rolleiflex. The interest of photography grew
when Bailey looked through Life magazine when off duty.

3.  David Bailey left the RAF in 1958, rejecting various job offers as he aspired to
learn, however, he himself got rejected from the London College of Printing.
 He then became a photographic assistant to David Olins soon followed on by
John French in 1959, helping to lead into what would become a very successful
career, something Bailey didn’t think possible of a mere ‘East Ender’.
 Bailey was offered a contract from Vogue magazine in 1960. A recognition of the
changing bodily style on the streets in 1964 made Bailey’s already interesting
work even more dynamic, boosting his popularity as a famous photographer.
 His photographs focused on makeup, nudity and odd dress sense. Bailey also
investigated into recreating old photographs of corpses with alive people,
making the new images with a different genre.

4.  Between the 1960’s until the early 1990’s, and still now in modern times,
Bailey explored themes such as glamour, fiction, seduction, camouflage
and deception, shooting for Vogue, and on occasion, Tatler, Ritz and
Glamour magazine, with his own collection of private work too.
 The focus of his portraiture looked into a celebrity lifestyle on a daily basis.
David Bailey has photographed
famous persons such as:
Catherine Bailey
Helmut Newton,
Jean Shripmton,
Ansel Adams,
David Bowie,
Boy George,
Mick Jagger,
Bill Brandt,
Bob Geldof

5.  This is a typically famous
photograph taken by Bailey,
showing all aspects of his
passion and reasons for the
ways he captured his
photography…
 One of the most notable points about
the portraits within the box is that
Bailey cut off the tops of the subject’s
head or cropped in closer than most
traditional portrait photographers
would have done at the time. This
gave an impression that the pictures
were bigger than they actually are, and
has since become a common practice in
portrait and fashion photography.
“a David Bailey photograph has a distinctive identity: that beyond the cultural and
historical factors responsible for Bailey’s rise there were specific characteristics
that marked him out among his peers”. – David Bailey: Archive One

6. By Ashleigh Spice
Books used:
 David Bailey ‘Archive One’ 1957-1969 Thames & Hudson
ISBN 0-500-54229-5
 David Bailey ‘Chasing Rainbows’ 1960s-2000s Thames & Hudson
ISBN 0-500-54241-4
 David Bailey ‘If We Shadows’ 1992 Thames & Hudson
ISBN 0-500-28255-2
Websites used:
 http://hollybennett.wordpress.com/
 http://davidbaileyphotography.com/
 http://davidbailey.com/
 http://pdngallery.com/legends/bailey/
 http://wikipedia.org/